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As an aside, back in the days of Stack Exchange I would always type out manually whatever answer I found to make sure I understood WTF I was adding to the system.

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I did this too. Almost always I'd rename variables, change formatting, add or remove comments, etc..

Unfortunately this feels less easy to do with modern tools. For example, Claude Code expects to edit your actual source files, and the Claude chat is much worse at writing code.

I use zed for this (you can use vscode as well), just use the side panel chat, take away write permissions, prompt it with "answer with code in chat" or similar, then you can use it as a personalized StackOverflow for your codebase. Even if it outputs an entire new file, you can take your time and go function by function.

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